31 Days by Barry Werth

Author:Barry Werth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307279842
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

DAY

18

_______________

Monday, August 26

“Deep breather in front of the open window”

_______________

Ford had scheduled his first White House press conference for Wednesday, hoping to focus the nation’s attention on the economy. Midmorning, he discussed inflation for ninety minutes with the cabinet, laying out goals for the September summit, promising to act sooner if needed. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz reported that retail food prices in July jumped at an annual rate of 30 percent but asserted that food supplies remained adequate despite a severe drought in the Midwest. “There is no reason for panic buying,” Butz said, adding, “and there has been some of that.”

Flanked by Schlesinger and Haig, Ford returned to the Oval Office to discuss his growing alarm over the military’s reported fears of a coup. “I talked to Haig about it,” he recalled, “and we concluded that it had been leaked deliberately from the highest level of the Pentagon.” Ford didn’t know about Brown’s confrontation with Schlesinger. Nor did he know the subterranean history between Nixon and the Joint Chiefs going back to the Moorer-Radford spy affair, or the full array of Haig’s connections and overlapping loyalties beginning with that period, when he worked under Kissinger out of the cramped National Security Council office in the White House basement and still wore his army colonel’s uniform on the job.

Ford was “furious,” he wrote, because Haig had assured him that no such measures had been taken. Even if the leaker’s main target was Nixon, the news stories fostered the impression that he—Ford—became president in a climate of dangerous instability, and that his presidency might be the product of a secret power shuffle. That such a story had been planted in the press less than three weeks into his term by someone in his top echelon could only be read as a direct affront to Ford’s leadership.

“Jim,” Ford said. “I’m damn disturbed about these rumors . . . Obviously, they came from the top, and I want the situation straightened out right away.”

Schlesinger denied that he was the source of the stories. Far from deferential—he alone among the cabinet secretaries had smoked a pipe throughout Nixon’s farewell speech in the East Room—he was vague about their accuracy. Yet if he and the Joint Chiefs had ordered the precaution on the basis of distrust for Nixon and Kissinger, or if concerns had risen to such a pitch that, as the newspapers were reporting, Schlesinger had taken to sleeping on a cot in his office to bar against a coup by—or against—Nixon, he hadn’t operated by himself. Haig would have been intimately aware and involved. A four-star general after a quick series of promotions during his White House tenure, Haig, albeit retired, was the ranking military officer in the White House. Nixon had used him to control Moorer, and Haig had coaxed and enabled Nixon’s resignation. Indeed, according to Nixon’s former counselor, convicted Watergate felon Charles Colson, Haig was the one who initiated the Pentagon watch, asking the military to disregard any order from Nixon.

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